Contents

Executive Summary

For our Final Project we wanted to be able to capture audio from the PlayStation Eye microphone array and then be able to display the audio waveforms all on the beagle.
Initially we set out to display the waveforms in Qt using Qwt, which was later proved to be more difficult than initiall anticipated due to limitations on the Beagle and neither of us having prior C++ programming experience.
The next thought was to try to use GnuPlot to try to plot the audio data. GnuPlot was really designed to produce static plots of information, not plots that were in realtime. We were able however to find different ways to "force" GnuPlot to plot the live data with the help of a clever script written by Thanassis Tsiodras, and then also edited by Andreas Bernauer which can be found here.
When we implemented this script with our audio data on the beagle it still wasn't as realtime as we would have liked it to be due to the capabilities of the beagle, so we then had the idea to send the data back to a host computer which would then have the processing capability to produce the results we were after.

We currently have working plots of audio waveforms for channel1 and channel2 of the PS Eye microphone array. These plots are displayed on a host computer with the data being sent from the beagle via netcat.

This project turned out to be a lot more difficult then initially anticipated. Although it would be nice for this project to run solely on the beagle it is very interesting to discover all of the possibilities of utilizing netcat between the beagle and host.

If everything worked you should now see 2 plots of audio that are from the Beagle board being displayed on the host computer.
To quit the plots just push ctrl-c in the terminal window of either the beagle or the host.